Routine
by Animegirl1129
Summary: In which Michael's day does not go as he planned all because of a kiss. Slash - Michael/Joey.


Routine

_**Written in response to cottoncandy_bingo prompt: morning. First My Two Dads fic (possibly first fic at all for the fandom? Dunno.) Characters not mine, please enjoy! Comments are awesome.  
**_

* * *

It starts out as an ordinary day on an ordinary morning.

But, then, don't most?

When Michael climbs out of bed to the shrill sound of his ringing alarm clock, he hardly expects to have a life-changing day ahead of him. It's just like every other - he showers, changes into the work clothes he'd laid out the night before, and after rushing through the rest of his usual routines, he slips out of his room in the hopes of grabbing some coffee before he has to head to the important meeting at work. And, if he had been anticipating something so dramatically impactful to happen, he would've expected to at least get out the door before the chaos began.

He should be so lucky.

Joey and Nicole are already up, too, when he steps out of his room. They're sitting at the bicycle table, chatting contentedly while they eat a breakfast Joey must've grabbed from Klawicki's. He doesn't really have time for breakfast, himself, not if he wants to get to the office in time to review his meeting notes before the important gathering begins, but he does have time for some much needed coffee. Normally, Joey makes a pot when he gets up - one of few things they don't regularly rely on the diner for - but today, he hasn't. "We're out," Joey explains, clearly realizing what Michael is after. "I'm goin' to the store later."

"Okay, then," Michael sighs, stealing the styrofoam cup that sits in front of Joey and downing a long sip.

Joey raises an eyebrow at him, "Want my egg sandwich, too, then?"

"Sure," he answers, and takes a bite of that when Joey jokingly wields it in his general direction.

"Very funny," Joey replies, but his the surprised expression on his face suggests that he wasn't actually anticipating such a move.

Michael grins and moves around to kiss Nicole goodbye, just like he does every morning. He plants a kiss on her cheek and wishes her a good day at school. She smiles at him and tells him to do the same.

"I'll try," he answers, stealing another sip of Joey's coffee, "getting to this meeting on time will go a long way towards that, though."

"Then you better get goin'," Joey adds in, stealing back his cup for one last sip before he surrenders it to Michael, who needs it far more than he does. "Here," he says, handing it over, their fingers brushing as the cup changes hands.

"Thanks," he says, and without thinking at all, Michael kisses him goodbye, too.

He freezes. Joey freezes. Nicole looks from one to the other with a sort of amused confusion in her eyes.

"I, ugh," he stutters, snapping back to reality, "I should go."

And he does. He bolts out the door, down the stairs (too impatient to wait on the elevator), and out onto the street. He walks in a sort of blind haze, mind spinning with what he's just done. Quite frankly, he's lucky that he doesn't aimlessly wander into oncoming traffic or fall down an open manhole. But, halfway to the subway, he realizes that he left his briefcase (and thus all of his notes on the merger meeting) back at the loft.

Michael utters a few choice words under his breath and turns around. He has no choice but to go back for it.

On his way, he stops at a payphone and calls his secretary, tells her he might be a little late getting in and to stall the clients, if she can. She says she'll do her best, asks if there's anything else she can do and, because she is the most amazing secretary ever, she politely ignores him when he requests that she find him a rock to live under.

So. Back to the loft, back up the stairs (this time prolonging the inevitable) and back to the door. He stands in front of it for several minutes, contemplating what in the world he's going to say to Joey to smooth this over, when it opens on its own.

Nicole appears, backpack slung over her shoulder, as she leaves for school.

"I guess you noticed you forgot your briefcase," she says, reaching just inside the door to grab it for him. "And I think you broke Joey."

"What?"

"He hasn't moved."

"At all?"

Nicole pushes open the door just a little further and reveals Joey, still sitting at the table. He's staring blankly at the wall. He doesn't seem to have noticed them hovering in the doorway and he's still holding onto the cold remnants of his breakfast sandwich. "Not at all."

"Huh," Michael says. "Well, you get to school. I'll try to unbreak him?"

"Good luck," she answers, slipping by him to head downstairs where she always meets Cory for the walk to the subway.

"I'll need it," he mumbles after her, as he steps back into the loft, pulling the door shut behind him. "Joe?"

Nothing.

He sets his briefcase back down and steps closer, reaching out a hand to settle on Joey's shoulder when he gets within reach. "Hey," he says, shaking the other man lightly, "Earth to Joey, come in?"

"Did you just kiss me?"

Michael, while relieved to have a communicating Joey again, grows concerned. "I, ugh, wouldn't say I 'just' kissed you. There was a good fifteen minute gap in there." Which is maybe not the best thing to say, really. "But, it was... Look, I didn't mean to, okay? It just kinda happened." It wasn't even a real kiss, just a kiss on the cheek like the one he'd given Nicole. Nothing. But if it was nothing, why can't he stop thinking, worrying, panicking? "So, if we could maybe just forget about it and then..."

But, Joey pushes his chair back from the table and gets to his feet. Since Michael had been close enough to touch before, he comes up nearly face to face with him. It's more than a little disconcerting, having Joey staring down at him when he doesn't quite know how the other man is going to react.

"Joey, really. We can just..."

"Where's Nicole?" He asks, which is not a question Michael expected.

"She left for school. Unless I need witnesses, in which case she's in her room," he answers, cautiously. Backing up would be an option, but he worries that will draw attention to just how close they are. "Do I need witnesses?"

Joey doesn't answer him, just keeps going with the awkward, frozen staring.

"Or! Or I could just go and we could talk about this later, or, you know, never? Would 'never' work for you, cause I'm thinking it would work for me," now he finally does back up, thinking that maybe he can just grab his briefcase and go and maybe salvage his meeting (even though he can't remember anything he ever planned to say at it, or, for that matter, who is even supposed to be there) and then salvage some semblance of his recently rekindled friendship with Joey later. Maybe he broke himself a little bit, too, when he accidentally slipped up and let all of the things he's managed to keep bottled up inside himself rear to the surface, things he's kept that way since they were kids themselves.

He's got his hand on the door and he's thinking this plan might actually work - forget all about it, avoid, deny and hope that things don't change too much between them - but then there's a hand on his arm that's keeping him from those last steps to an escape and damn it, he didn't even hear Joey _move_.

"What're you-" is as far as he gets before Joey spins him back around and kisses him. Really kisses him, not like the not-quite-a-kiss that started this mess.

And, honestly, it's hardly a perfect kiss. It's rough and Michael is definitely not used to kissing anybody with facial hair, the scratch of stubble on his face is a strange feeling. It's quick, too, so much so that he doesn't really have time to react before Joey breaks away from it. He doesn't go far, though, just pulls back enough to breathe out a quiet reply of, "I don't think 'never' is gonna work for me," his blue eyes searching Michael's for some sort of reaction.

"Good," Michael answers, and his hands come up to fist into the material of Joey's faded shirt in an attempt to catch himself when Joey suddenly surges forward again, pressing him back against the door. One of Joey's hands is still curled around his wrist, but the other slides into Michael's curly hair, pulling him in for another kiss. This one's longer, and thus actually gives Michael the chance to kiss back.

"You have no idea how long I've wanted to do that," Joey says, still pressing kiss after kiss against Michael's mouth.

"I might," Michael answers. "If it involves the words 'high school'."

Joey laughs, exasperated because maybe Michael does have some idea and maybe they've wasted so much time where they could have had each other - nearly thirteen years of stony nothingness between them, and the half a year of awkwardly repairing their friendship as they adjusted to life with each other and with Nicole (who, in all fairness, they wouldn't have gotten without going through those thirteen lonely years). "Yeah, that'd be about right," he agrees. He leans against Michael, just reveling in finally being able to be so close, and presses his forehead against the other man's, "any chance you can get out of your meeting, if you haven't already?"

"The meeting!" Michael's alarm is clear as he scrambles out from where he's pinned, between Joey and the heavy, metal door. His briefcase is on the floor right there and he thinks about picking it up for just a second before he reconsiders, even though his watch is telling him that he is so so so unfathomably, inexcusably late. "The meeting," he says, calmly this time. He marches to the phone and calls his secretary. He can hear Kelcher in the background, likely placating the clients for the merger. "I can't come in," he tells her, glancing back at Joey who looks at him in clear surprise, "something's come up."

She tells him that it sounds like Kelcher has talked them into rescheduling and that, helpfully, the clients were also having issues this morning and likely would've rescheduled even if Michael had shown up. "Really?" He asks, surprised. "Well, then. Tell Kelcher I'll be in tomorrow."

He hangs up the phone and finds Joey close by. "That sounded like it went surprisingly well?"

"I'll say. The meeting was cancelled," he explains.

Joey is clearly very pleased with that news. "So, that means you're stuck here," he grins, a wicked smile that Michael knows often brings trouble with it, "With me. All day."

"I suppose it does, yes," Michael answers, somewhat hesitantly. "But don't you have art related things that you should be doing?"

"Mm, nope. Don't think so," he says, which is a total lie because there's been a half-finished project taking up all of the room on their little balcony for the last week and a half. "Pretty sure that I don't have anything like that that I might have to do today."

Michael opts to play along - the thing's not going anywhere, what's another day? - and crosses his arms over his chest, eyeing Joey carefully, "so what do you intend we do with all of this free time we have, exactly?"

Moving in closer, Joey reaches up and deliberately unfolds Michael's arms, dragging his hands down them as they straighten out, catching Michael's hands in his own when he hits the end. "Mm," he says, his eyes dark and his voice a conspiratorial level of quiet that draws Michael in for another kiss, the one long and intense. "I can think of a few things."

"Me, too," Michael retorts, freeing his hands to slide them under Joey's shirt. His fingers graze over light muscles and drag through the liberal dusting of chest hair (which is weird, much like the coarse stubble had been, but not unwelcome). His eyes catch Joey's and the look he finds there seems to suggest that his move to up the game will be accepted and matched in turn.

There's another kiss, this one with the addition of a probing tongue exploring his mouth, teeth that bite lightly at his lips. But that only distracts him from Joey's fingers flying over the buttons of his dress shirt, then struggling with the knot in his tie (he's not surprised, he has no idea when Joey would last have had occasion to wear one, let alone untie one), before both of those things and his suit jacket, are pushed off his shoulders and down his arms in one move. It all gets tossed in the general direction of one of the kitchen chairs, but Michael is a little too focused on the press of Joey's lips as they move over his jaw and down to his neck to care where they end up.

"You have way too many layers," Joey complains, exasperated as he pulls away so he can drag Michael's undershirt over his head.

In comparison, Michael finds it a very simple task to quickly divest Joey of his faded, sleeveless t-shirt. "Luckily, you don't."

His eyes flick over Joey in a different sort of way than they usually do. It's hardly the first time he's ever seen Joey without a shirt - this'll hardly be the first time he's seen Joey naked, either - but it's the first time he gets to allow himself to look the way he wants to, to touch, to kiss, to do whatever Joey'll let him.

"Do we like what we see?" Joey teases, his own hands drawing slowly over Michael's bared skin in an odd sort of hesitant way as he takes it in. "I know I do," he mumbles. This is different from the casual touches that come with everyday life, the deliberate ones that are a part of their endless competitions. As much as they're familiar with each other in all of the roommate, friend, best friend ways, this shift in their relationship is unfamiliar.

"Think it's safe to say that," Michael agrees.

It's awkward, almost, with the tentative way in which Joey's hand lands on Michael belt. His eyes dart up to meet Michael's, like he's asking permission that he doesn't need. In answer, he offers a slight nod, which must be enough because it gets undone and pulled loosed, tossed aside like the rest of their discarded clothing.

His own hands work at undoing Joey's tight jeans, but he finds himself fumbling when his own dress pants get undone first. A hand snakes into them, curls around him within the tighter than usual confines, and strokes lightly. Honestly, it's all he can do to keep stranding, his own hands frozen in place.

"C'mere," Joey says, leading Michael across the room, and he has no choice but to follow after him. Joey's bed has already been 'made' for the day, so all they hit is the hard wood of the fake bed, but that works well enough. Joey pushes and nudges until he's sprawled across it and climbs over him, sealing his lips over Michael's in another kiss as he shoves his pants down a bit. He knocks Michael's hands away to undo his own jeans, pushes those down, too.

And, okay, Michael can totally work with this. He brings one hand up to his mouth, licks a stripe up his palm and finally gets his hand on Joey, moving up and down in slow, drawn out movements as he spreads the moisture around. "This okay?"

"Yeah," Joey says, after a string of curses. The arm that he's using to brace himself falters for a second before he regains control, with a mumbled, "God, that's good," before he mirrors that move and reestablishes his own grip on Michael, hand sliding smoothly as they both move closer to the edge of release.

"You can say that again," Michael manages, hips pressing up against Joey's hold on him.

"S'good," he says again, leaning down to nip lightly at Michael's lips, his chine, his neck, down the center of his chest. "You're good."

And, for something that they've both wanted (to varying degrees) for literally half of their lives, it doesn't disappoint, even if it doesn't last all that long this time around. There are a lot of slow, lazy kisses in the come down, along with some hasty clean up. Joey sucks a mark into Michael's neck and Michael leaves a couple of his own along Joey's collarbone. Pants get kicked the rest of the way off, and they eventually retreat to Michael's room, gathering their clothes as they go, where there is a comfortable bed and a door that can close behind them.

"Feels like high school," Michael laughs, as he moves from the door to join Joey on his bed.

"Not at all," Joey disagrees, curling a hand around the back of Michael's neck as he draws him in for another kiss, shifting close together on the bed. "If we were in high school we'd either be on round three about now, or your mom would have come barging in on us in the middle of that."

Which, yeah. Both of those things are probably true, especially that second one. "Fair points," he concedes, but then pauses, staring, somewhat incredulously at Joey, "Round three, you say? Getting a little ahead of things, aren't we? There hasn't been a round two, yet."

"I told you I could think of a few things for us to do with all of this alone time we've got today," he counters, that mischievous smile on his face again. "But sadly, we are not in high school, so how about a little break before we work our way up to that. And then maybe a snack."

"Sounds like a plan," Michael agrees with a laugh, pulling the blankets up around them, limbs tangling together when they both curl into each other. It seems more like this is the thousandth time they've gone to sleep like this instead of the first.

He's sure it won't be the last.

* * *

The following morning begins just as most others do - as deceptive as that has proven to be, given yesterday's ordinary start to an extraordinary day. Nonetheless, there's the blaring of an alarm clock, a hot shower, the clothes Michael laid out for himself late last night, and the rest of his typical morning routines. He yawns his way out of his room, and to the pot of coffee on the counter.

Nicole's already up, chewing absently on an apple while she looks over her homework from the night before.

"Test today, right?" he asks, recalling her mentioning something about needing to study.

"Right," she answers, leaning over to accept the kiss he plants on her cheek. "Morning, Dad."

"Social Studies or Science?"

"Math," Nicole says, tapping a finger against the book as she tries to recall an answer. "Why do there need to be letters in math? Weren't numbers enough? It's not like there was a shortage of numbers to work with."

Michael laughs, "I'm pretty sure Joey asked that same question when he was twelve."

Joey appears from the bathroom, dressed in a paint-stained shirt and ripped up jeans, his hair still damp from a shower."What did I ask when I was twelve?"

"Oh," he says, "just telling Nicole about how you and Algebra did not get along well."

Joey cringes at the very word. "Ugh, hated that class."

Nicole laughs, and gathers up her books. "Is it okay if I go meet up with Cory downstairs? I promised I'd help him go over this one section..."

"Yeah," Michael agrees, "Go on. Good luck."

Joey nods, kissing her goodbye as she gathers her backpack. "Yeah, honey, good luck. Know you'll do better than I would."

"Well, that's setting the bar low," Michael teases, which earns him a perhaps well-deserved shove and a look of feigned insult. "Only kidding," he defends, shoving back.

She's shaking her head, laughing at her two goofy fathers, as she leaves the loft, pulling the door closed behind her.

"You leaving, too?" Joey asks, going to pour his own cup of coffee.

"In a minute," he answers, grabbing up an apple to eat on the subway. "Gotta head off Kelcher about yesterday and reschedule that meeting. Your plans?"

"With any luck my project will be out of here tonight," he nods in the general direction of the balcony, where the long unfinished commissioned project resides. "Or, well, maybe tomorrow."

Michael will not be surprised if it's still there next week, when the deadline for it hits. He'd probably be less surprised to come home to find the bricks on the balcony painted in varying neon colors than to find the project completed, but he doesn't mind because that's just how Joey works. He has no doubt it will be done in time - just not before then, probably. "Have fun with that," he says, around another mouthful of coffee.

"I plan to."

A glance at his watch tells him that it's time he headed out, as comfortable as this easy bickering with Joey always proves to be, and so he gathers up his briefcase and reluctantly makes for the door.

"Michael, wait," Joey calls, following after him.

"Hm?"

"You forgot something."

He's about to ask what - he has his briefcase, his planner, his coffee - but that wicked grin on Joey's face tells him just what it is he's neglected to do. "Oh, did I now?"

"Yeah," he answers, pressing into Michael's personal space. He lingers there, like he's waiting for something and Michael sees fit to tease him a bit more. He leans in, presses a quick kiss to Joey's cheek, just like the one that started all of this yesterday.

"Good?" He asks.

"That's it?"

"Oh, you wanted something like this," he grins, offering a real kiss this time. His tongue, tasting of coffee, delves into Joey's mouth for an all too brief moment before it, and the rest of Michael, moves away. It's enough, a promise of more to come later that leaves Joey reaching out for him.

"You sure you don't wanna call out of work again?" Joey questions, and Michael has to stamp down on the urge to give in and do just that. "It's Friday," he tempts, "and Nicole is going to Nina's..."

Michael forces himself to back toward the door, slide it open and step out. "Tell you what," he says, a grin on his face, "You finish that thing by tonight and I'm yours all weekend."

There's a wicked laugh, and Joey looks ready to bolt out to the balcony and knock that thing out right now. "You got a deal," he grins, darting forward to steal another quick kiss. "Now get to work."

The door closes and Michael walks away, thinking that he could very easily get used to this new routine of theirs.


End file.
